Syracuse Sun

Le Moyne College issued the following announcement on Oct. 28.

The Community Hub is a new initiative that will promote social justice through engaged service learning, community-based scholarship and volunteerism within the Central New York region. The hub will support existing community-directed learning and research efforts, and initiate new collaborative projects that would invite faculty from diverse disciplines to partner with College neighbors in solving challenges facing the Syracuse community. 

Reporting to the Office of Mission Integration & Development at Le Moyne, Director Alice Zicari is working closely with the Community Hub faculty advisors:

Alison Marganski, Ph.D., is an associate professor and director of criminology at Le Moyne College. Her background includes quantitative and qualitative research relating to violence and victimization from interdisciplinary and intersectional perspectives, and she has experience working with victims, offenders, and justice-related services. She is a nationally recognized expert (National Institute of Justice, Center for Victim Research, Crime & Justice Research Alliance) and the recipient of the 2018 Robert Ezra Park Award from the Association for Applied & Clinical Sociology, which is presented for outstanding contributions that demonstrate how sociological practice (applied or clinical) can advance and improve society. She has presented her work to United Nations-UN Women, and has been a Fellow for the Center for Urban & Regional Applied Research. Recently, Alison served as vice president for the Association for Applied & Clinical Sociology (AACS), an organization committed to increasing knowledge of social behavior for academic and non-academic practitioners to create positive social change. She is currently on the Board of Directors for Second Chance Canine Adoption Shelter, an animal-inmate program that pairs incarcerated individuals at Jamesville Correctional Facility with dogs rescued off the streets of the city of Syracuse for mutual rehabilitation. Additionally, she collaborates with various organizations/agencies at the local, regional, and national levels (e.g. Vera House, the Center for Community Alternatives, CNY SPCA, Women Count USA, etc.) and regularly integrates experiential learning opportunities into her courses. She has led workshops as well as facilitated trainings on trauma, violence prevention, and bystander intervention, and she is a member of the College’s Community Coordinated Response Team and Gender & Women's Studies board. Alison will assist the Community Hub in learning more about community-based work at Le Moyne and in developing resources for faculty and staff who are interested in community work and social justice, which includes foundational materials and workshops aimed at building/enhancing collaborative practices in the areas of teaching, research, and service.

Delia Popescu, Ph.D., is an associate professor of political science. She is director of the Peace and Global Studies and of the Legal Studies programs. Popescu is an applied political theorist with broad interests across social movement theory, resistance, totalitarianism, critical discourse analysis, memory construction, and dissident work, particularly that of Vaclav Havel. She is author of Political Action in Vaclav Havel’s Thought: The Responsibility of Resistance (Lexington Press, 2011). Popescu published several articles related to rhetorical constructions and institutional marginalization, communist law in Eastern Europe, nation branding and minority power relations, the Roma minority across Europe, and the construction of democratic deliberation. Her current work focuses on comparative political theory and the conceptualization of East European political thought, which resulted in a chapter on “Eastern European Political Thought as a Conceptual Tool” in the Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory (2020). At Le Moyne College, she serves on the Provost's Diversity Council, the Gender and Women’s Studies Board, the El-Hindi/PGS Board, as well as representing international faculty on the Faculty Senate. She is a founding member of the Association for Jesuit Colleges and Universities (AJCU) taskforce on Education for the Marginalized and Refugees.  Delia will facilitate and assist the Community Hub with service learning through course and faculty development.  She will also connect the Community Hub to her work with the International Association of Jesuit Universities, the Jesuit Refugee Service, and her research on immigrants. 

Farha Ternikar, Ph.D., is an associate professor of sociology. Her  research background includes qualitative research on South Asian immigrant and Muslim American communities. She currently teaches Social Inequality and  Gender and Society, and  also teaches Race, Class and Gender. She has experience working in the Syracuse community with refugee groups, Bipoc faculty in the greater Syracuse area, and is active in the Muslim community. She is currently co-directing the committee on Race, ethnicity and racism for the Eastern Sociological Society. She has collaborated with faculty at SUNY Oswego, Ithaca College and Syracuse University on issues around social justice and anti-racism. She  currently also co-directs the Consortium for Culture and Medicine along with Rebecca Garden (SUNY Upstate), and is an affiliate faculty in Food Studies at Syracuse University.  At Le Moyne College, she also serves on the Provost Diversity Council, Gender and Women’s Studies Board, the Peace and Global Studies Board and the El-Hindi Board.   She will continue to assist with community partnerships including the Black Leadership Coalition, RISE, Peace Inc, NYCLU,  Interfaith Works, BLM and the Sankofa Center. She will also be working to connect the director and faculty to Syracuse University faculty at the Lender Center for Social Justice and the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. She will also help create and maintain a social-justice lecture series including community leaders and activists, and lead the Community Hub on anti-racism initiatives. Lastly, she will be working closely with the Community Hub director to strengthen Le Moyne's relationships with the community by connecting faculty through introductions and meetings/webinars with community partners that are serving underrepresented and historically disadvantaged groups.

Robert White, Ph.D., FHAE, MSc, BSc is an associate professor and director of Doctoral Studies in the Department of Education at Le Moyne College. He is also the international coordinator for Inclusion and Equity, UNESCO Teacher Task Force. He has a broad academic background that spans education, psychology, mental health and child & youth development. His research interests are supported by a solid foundation in trans-disciplinary research informed by mixed methods approaches that incorporate; qualitative endeavors situated in grounded theory; quantitative investigations that utilize factor analysis and structural equation modeling to understand the complexities of inter-related variables; the challenges of merging data sets to reach robust synthesis for understanding and inform recommendations for policy and practice.  Prior to joining Le Moyne College he spent recent years working within the School of Education, University of Aberdeen, the Institute of Education, University of Wolverhampton, The Clemmer College of Education, East Tennessee State University, The Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine, Centre for Psychiatry: Queen Mary University of London Medical School, and the Community, Health and Educational Studies Research Centre: Northumbria University to develop a sociocultural understanding of the protective factor of school and how teachers can support emotional wellbeing, mental health and resiliency to help children and adolescents overcome adversity and improve life outcomes through pedagogy that embraces social justice and empowerment.  Robert has also worked with hundreds of schools around the world to develop culturally competent programs to meet the needs of the most hard to serve children and adolescents facing emotional and behavioral difficulties that lead to social marginalization, exclusion and on-going precarity, social injustices and inequalities.  Robert will assist the Community Hub in accessing funding related to supporting the activities and budget of the Community Hub, developing a long-term strategic plan, and leading a multidisciplinary group of faculty to apply for a grant related to the social determinants of health.

Original source can be found here.